Vatican City, Jan 10, 2015 / 08:14 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis told an audience of Haiti earthquake survivors and relief agencies that restoration is only possible when communities unite in charity, tearing down walls of individualism and focusin... Read more

Vatican City, Jan 10, 2015 / 06:08 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Following the attack on the French magazine 'Charlie Hebdo’, the Vatican's newspaper has commented  that behind these ‘inhuman acts’ is an undeclared nihilism, which can be glimpsed through the exaltation of suicide and the evident drive to death. “The totalitarian collectivism aim at the destruction of humanity and to its self-annihilation. A dark soul beats from the deep of this ideological hell, and there lies a sense of what we may think without a scope. We are still in front to nihilism, that some of philosophers have declared overcome and obsolete,” L’Osservatore Romano published in its Jan. 8 edition. Dario Fertilio, the author of the article, stressed that “terroristic violence” may be described as inhuman, since “every totalitarian ideology hides a human inclination to dominate the other and to instrumentally use terror and violence for its own purpose.” The author compares jihadism with Bolshevik communism or National Socialism, aiming to find an inner sense to the car-bombs in Iraq, to the beheadings perpetrated by the Islamic State, to al-Qaeda suicide attacks, and to slaughter of innocents by Boko Haram. According to the Vatican newspaper, current explanation of the phenomenon may be reductive, or at least superficial. Beyond the wish “to cause pain to the enemy to educate him,” or the attacks on education – “with a fury that is considered an outcome of a not well specified cultural backwardness,” the author identifies an “inflexible logic and even foreseeable” of any totalitarian system, that “may be assimilated to the action of a virus, of ideologic kind.” The article stress that any totalitarianism needs to keep on expanding, although it might be able to use “skilled diplomatic and communicative strategies,” since “if it quits” expanding “it means it entered in a phase of regression, and this decline may mean his end.” Despite jihadism being seemingly far from a regression or an end, the Vatican newspaper stress that since totalitarian ideology is unable to spread, it tends to attack itself, “targeting those that in theory” the ideology “should represent and protect.” Hence, “the intimidation of dissidents, the doing-away of any opposition, the eruption of heterodoxies, the generalized internal terror against the ‘different’ and the ‘unfaithful’, the denouncing of plots or betrayal and so on.” In the end, “terrorism and acts of ruthless violence may solely be masks of their true totalitarian nature,” that “like a parasite, uses every tool at its disposal – a sacred book, national pride, the worship of land, of blood, of social class belonging – only for instrumentalization, with the task to pursue the real hidden target of controlling power. And this control may be in turn only functional to perpetuate its system of dominating.” These are the nihilist roots of the most recent events, according to the Vatican newspaper. “Everybody, taken by the need to denounce the mass conformism and the modern forms of authoritarianism, have forgotten the heart of darkness, that is the totalitarian evil as the diabolical illness of power uniquely able to destroy,” L’Osservatore Romano reads. The article concludes that, as this power goes beyond every limit, “it cannot be anything else than pure energy of overpowering, inexhaustible source of pain and death.” “Destructive and self-destructive, in an attempt to replace God, perhaps we are now facing the nihilism” denounced by the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky and later theorized as a “vital force” by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzche. Read more

Vatican City, Jan 9, 2015 / 11:35 am (CNA/EWTN News).- According to Italy's daily Catholic newspaper, the commission of theologians at the Congregation for the Causes of Saints has recognized the 1980 assassination of Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero as a martyrdom. “According to canonical practice, all that remains for the beatification is the judgement of the commission of bishops and cardinals and finally the approbation of the Pope, concluding the procedure that would soon lead to beatification” Avvenire's Stefania Falasca wrote Jan. 8. The theologians unanimously approved a finding that the archbishop was killed for hatred of the faith, and thus that his death was a martyrdom. Oscar Romero y Galdamez was Archbishop of San Salvador from 1977 until March 24, 1980, when he was shot while saying Mass. He was a vocal critic of the human rights abuses of the repressive Salvadoran government, and he spoke out on behalf of the poor and the victims of the government. No one has been prosecuted for his assassination, but right-wing death squads are suspected. Archbishop Romero's cause of canonization was opened in 1993, but was reportedly held up in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 2000 to 2005; as part of the inquiry in a cause of sainthood, the doctrinal dicastery is charged with reviewing the subject's writings to ensure they are free of error. Both Pope Francis and Benedict XVI hold Archbishop Romero in high regard. En route to Brazil on May 9, 2007, Benedict told journalists that the Salvadoran “was certainly an important witness of the faith, a man of great Christian virtue who worked for peace and against the dictatorship, and was assassinated while celebrating Mass. Consequently, his death was truly 'credible', a witness of faith.” “The problem,” he continued, “was that a political party wrongly wished to use him as their badge, as an emblematic figure. How can we shed light on his person in the right way and protect it from these attempts to exploit it?” Archbishop Romero has been held up particularly by supporters of Marxism, because of his advocacy for the poor and his opposition to the Salvadoran military government. Benedict continued: “This is the problem. It is under examination and I await confidently what the Congregation for the Causes of Saints will have to say on the matter.” During his Jan. 7 General Audience address, Pope Francis quoted Archbishop Romero's saying that mothers experience a “martyrdom of motherhood,” and went on to quote extensively from one of the archbishop's homilies, for the funeral of a priest assassinated by death squads. And while on his flight to South Korea on Aug. 18, 2014, Pope Francis said it is “very important” to “quickly” move forward Archbishop Romero's cause, adding that “for me Romero is a man of God, but the process has to be followed, and the Lord too has to give his sign… If he wants to do it, he will do it.” “What I would like is a clarification about martyrdom in odium fidei, whether it can occur either for having confessed the Creed or for having done the works which Jesus commands with regard to one’s neighbour. And this is a task for the theologians. They are studying it.” With the latest news from the theologians of the congregations for saints' causes, it seems the theologians have made the clarification they were asked for. Read more

Vatican City, Jan 9, 2015 / 07:30 am (CNA/EWTN News).- In his homily Friday Pope Francis cautioned against the narcissism of those who close their hearts out of fear, insecurity or vanity, saying that only the Holy Spirit can make us docile and open to love. “We have ‘mirror men and women’ (who are wedded to their own image in the mirror), who are closed in on themselves and are constantly looking at themselves, right? These religious narcissists, right?” the Pope told those present for his Jan. 9 daily Mass. These people, he said, “have a hardened heart because they are closed in on themselves, they are not open. And they seek to defend themselves with these walls that they have created around themselves.” Pope Francis spoke to those present in the chapel of the Vatican’s Saint Martha guesthouse, centering his reflections on the day’s Gospel reading, which recounted how Jesus’ disciples were afraid when they saw him walking on the water. The reason for their fear was that their hearts had been hardened, the Pope observed, explaining that a person’s heart can become like stone for various reasons, including a painful life experience. However, there are those whose hearts become hard because they close in on themselves and refuse to go out, he said, noting that these people create “a world within oneself, all closed in. Closed within oneself, in one’s community or parish, but always closed in.” Closure such as this can have many different roots, the Bishop of Rome explained, pointing out that pride, self-sufficiency, vanity and the tendency to think we are better than others are all common causes. Other hearts harden due to problems of insecurity and fear, in which the person barricades themselves behind a wall of rules and regulations, the pontiff continued, noting that in reality these people create a prison for themselves in order to feel safe. “When a heart becomes hardened, it’s not free, and if it’s not free it’s because that person isn't capable of love,” he said, referring to the day’s first reading from the First Letter of John, in which the apostle declares that perfect love casts out all fear. Love has no fear because fear anticipates some sort of punishment, the Roman Pontiff observed, explaining that a person who is fearful is not free, and doesn’t have this perfect love which the apostle spoke about. Fearful people, he said, “are constantly afraid that something painful or sad will occur which will cause their life to go badly or will endanger their eternal salvation…What an (over-active) imagination, because he or she can’t love!” Pope Francis then said that despite all of the different spirituality or study courses we take, it is only through the Holy Spirit that it is possible to learn how to love and to be open. “You can follow thousands of catechism courses, thousands of spirituality courses, thousands of yoga or Zen courses and all these things. But none of this will be able to give you the freedom as a child (of God).”   “Only the Holy Spirit can prompt your heart to say ‘Father’” and break the hardness of heart so that it is free to love, the Pope explained. He concluded by emphasizing that the Holy Spirit does not simply make our hearts “soft,” but rather makes them “docile…Docile toward the Lord; docile when it comes to the freedom to love.” Read more